Most important political news this week: New report kills GOP’s radical agenda

[DonViejo]

Christie and the bridge is big. But Obamacare driving down healthcare inflation is even bigger. Here's why

BRIAN BEUTLER

The furthest-reaching political news of the week has nothing to do with who clogged the George Washington Bridge or what Robert Gates thinks of Barack Obama’s completely justifiable skepticism of David Petraeus and the war in Afghanistan.

It came in a seemingly boring actuarial report from a government agency most people probably have never of, showing that for the first time since the 1990s, total U.S. healthcare spending grew at a slower rate than the U.S. economy at the beginning of the current decade.

This sounds like the kind of thing only wonks and other nerds care about, which is probably why it didn’t become a #hashtag meme on Twitter or whatever, but the implications of the great healthcare spending slowdown are vast, and have thus reignited a long-simmering academic and ideological debate over whether, and to what extent, Obamacare deserves credit.

I’ll get to the politics in a minute. But the boiled-down version of the debate is as follows. Healthcare inflation began slowing shortly before Obamacare became law, and has decelerated further since then. It’s certainly possible that this correlation is strictly coincidental — that the slowdown is entirely secular, or so overwhelmingly a symptom of the Great Recession that it will reverse itself when economic recovery is at hand.

But there’s a decent chance that Obamacare has contributed to the slowdown, and prominent health economists — including ones who don’t have dogs in the fight — are engaged in a lively effort to settle this very question. Opinion journalists and political partisans are engaged in a similar debate, although for very different reasons.

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http://www.salon.com/2014/01/09/most_important_political_news_this_week_new_report_kills_gops_radical_agenda/